Monthly Archives: July 2012

Mitt Romney has a post up at NRO’s Corner in which he explains why he believes that the choices a society makes about its culture play a role in creating prosperity, and that the significant disparity between Israeli and Palestinian living standards was powerfully influenced by it. Here, in part, is what Romney wrote: [W]hat exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture? In the case of the United States, it »

With more than one-quarter of the vote in, Ted Cruz is leading David Dewhurst in the Texas Republican Senate run-off. His margin is 54-46 which translates into 50,000 votes. Politico has declared Cruz the winner. This is a huge victory for the Tea Party which, polls showed, supported Cruz overwhelmingly and provided him with his margin of victory. It’s also a victory for the Republican Party because Cruz is both »

When Charles Krauthammer observed in his weekly Washington Post column this past Friday that Obama had begun his presidency by removing the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office and returning it to the British embassy, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer went ballistic. He vehemently denied that Obama had done so and accused Krauthammer of retailing a falsehood. The truth was pointed out to Pfeiffer during the day »

Michael Ramirez cleverly puts one of Barack Obama’s most mind-numbingly stupid orations into the context of the Olympic games. You think you won that gold medal? Ha! You’d be nowhere without the guy who build the medal stand! Of course, if we were in the U.S., the medal stand probably would have been built by a small business that is threatened with extinction by the Obama administration’s hostile policies. »

Mitt Romney has wound up a successful tour of England, Israel and Poland, but you won’t be able to tell that from the headlines. The media wing of the Obama campaign has done everything possible to distract from the the strong messages Romney delivered in Jerusalem and Warsaw. Today they tried to make a “gaffe” out of the fact that a Romney aide, Rick Gorka, lost his temper and told »

Mitt Romney has moved on to Poland, but his critics continue to harp on his statement in Israel that cultural factors help explain why the Israeli economy so massively outstrips its Palestinian counterpart. For example, the Washington Post’s Scott Wilson calls Romney’s remark “puzzling” and “not widely shared in Israel.” Wilson presents no evidence in support of his latter assertion, and the headline of his story, “In Israel, Romney wows »

Once upon a time conservatives agitated to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. But hardly anyone on the right cares about the Post Office any more for the simple reason that technology has enabled us to go right around it: we use faxes and emails to transmit documents, pay our bills online, and send packages by UPS or FedEx. (By the way, when the fax machine was first being brought to »

One of my long time analytical axioms is that only Republicans can fix our health care system, and only Democrats can fix runaway entitlements. This is a variation of the point I have argued before on Power Line—last year here, and again here—that large changes in social policy can only proceed with the consent—not necessarily the agreement, but the consent—of the minority party. That’s why virtually all milestone social legislation »

Jim Hibbs was an All-American catcher for Stanford University, a member of the 1964 Olympic baseball team, a minor leaguer for eight years, and, briefly, a major leaguer with the (then) California Angels. He is also a Power Line reader. Jim has written the story of his baseball playing career in a book called A Catcher’s Story. I like the book a lot, and believe that those who followed baseball »

Earlier today, Mitt Romney spoke at Warsaw University. The New York Times aptly described Romney’s speech as “lyrical,” as he talked about freedom and about the shared history of Poland and the United States. Having essentially been endorsed by Lech Walesa, Romney recalled the glory days of Solidarity in the 1980s: In a turbulent world, Poland stands as an example and defender of freedom. Only last month, in Gdansk, »

Today is Milton Friedman’s 100th birthday. It is one of the great privileges of my life to have known him some, and to have spent some time with him in San Francisco back in the 1990s. Driving with him up and down the hills of San Francisco was not for the faint of heart. All of his rational calculations of risk seemed to go out the window when he was »

Federal Judge Reggie Walton has found that internal DOJ documents about the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case “contradict Assistant Attorney General [Thomas] Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in” the decision to dismiss the case. In other words, as Hans Von Spakovsky says, “the sworn testimony of Perez, the Obama political appointee who heads the Civil Rights Division, before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was »

Minnesota Sixth District Rep. Michele Bachmann has been under fire lately for her letters to the Inspectors General raising concerns about the possible involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood in activities of the United States government. Our small local chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition convened a get-together last night to rally around Michele. As chapter chairman Mark Miller figures, this was Rep. Bachmann’s fifth appearance before our chapter. No one »

In his book The Promise, left-wing writer Jonathan Alter recounts the following incident from President Obama’s first year in office: A congressman approached the first lady at a White House reception after the [stimulus] bill’s passage and told her the stimulus was the best anti-poverty bill in a generation. Her reaction was “Shhhh!” The White House didn’t want the public thinking that Obama had achieved long-sought public policy objectives under »

You have probably heard about Newsweek magazine’s claim that Mitt Romney is a “wimp.” You remember Newsweek–it was sold for $1 and will stop printing within the next few weeks. Still, somehow, someone apparently cares what some unknown left-wing internet hack, who writes for an almost-nonexistent publication that is worth a tiny fraction of Power Line, thinks of the Republican presidential candidate. So here is Newsweek’s next cover, courtesy of »

This ad by Restore Our Future focuses on Mitt Romney’s salvaging of the 2002 winter Olympics. It is simple and effective; it features former Olympians, most notably Kristi Yamaguchi, in a relatively rare instance where celebrity endorsements actually make sense. The ad’s timing is obviously appropriate, and it sounds a basic theme of the Romney campaign, implicitly contrasting Romney, the brilliant manager, with Barack Obama, who would need help to »

…has been the press coverage. It has been hypercritical, to put it mildly. It started in England, where Romney’s observation that certain logistical issues relating to the Olympic Games were “disconcerting”–a judgment that has since proved resoundingly correct–was treated as a major diplomatic faux pas. Already forgotten, apparently, is the press’s attempt to make something sinister out of a Romney aide’s reference to America’s “Anglo-Saxon heritage” and its “shared history” »